Revealing the High-Redshift Star Formation Rate with Gamma-Ray Bursts

By H. Yüksel, Matthew D. Kistler, J. Beacom, Andrew M. Hopkins. 2008

312 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While the high-z frontier of star formation rate (SFR) studies has advanced rapidly, direct measurements beyond z ∼ 4 remain difficult, as shown by significant disagreements among different results. Gamma-ray bursts, owing to their brightness and association with massive stars, offer hope of clarifying this situation, provided that the GRB rate can be properly related to the SFR. The Swift GRB data reveal an increasing evolution in the GRB rate relative to the SFR at intermediate z; taking this into account, we use the highest-z GRB data to make a new determination of the SFR at z = 4–7. Our results exceed the lowest direct SFR measurements and imply that no steep drop exists in the SFR up to at least z ∼ 6.5. We discuss the implications of our result for cosmic reionization, the efficiency of the universe in producing stellar-mass black holes, and “GRB feedback” in star-forming hosts.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/706605e31826fa3a04540e77f817ec3c2396e002

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Citations in the corpus

GRB 080913 AT REDSHIFT 6.7 (2008, background): “…Hjorth et al. 2003; Stanek et al. 2003), long GRBs probe the evolution of cosmic star formation (Totani 1997; Wijers et al. 1998; Chary et al. 2007; Yüksel et al. 2008), re-ionization of the intergalactic medium (Miralda-Escude 1998, Totani et al. 2006), and the metal enrichment history of the…”
Rates of superluminous supernovae at z ∼ 0.2 (2013, methodology): “If the SLSNe rates simply track the cosmic star formation rate (CSFR), then, using the parameterization of Yüksel et al. (2008), the CSFR and thus SLSN rate should be about 5 times larger at z ∼ 3 than we have measured for the nearby ROTSE-IIIb sample.”
The effect of the metallicity-specific star formation history on double compact object mergers (2019, background): “Yüksel et al. (2008) recover an SFR drop-off at higher redshifts from gamma-ray burst observations that is less steep than the drop-off recovered from UV observations.”
Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA): ugriz galaxy luminosity functions (2011, background): “Looking back in time with increasing redshift, the star formation rate appears to peak at redshift z ' 1, above which it plateaus and slowly declines towards z ' 6 (Cole et al. 2000; Hopkins 2004; Hopkins & Beacom 2006; Yuksel et al. 2008; Kistler et al. 2009).”
Cosmogenic neutrinos: parameter space and detectabilty from PeV to ZeV (2010, background): “…1, the results of the different studies disagree on the shape of the SFR, though a tendency towards a plateau in the range of z ∼ 1 − 4 and then a more or less steep decrease for z & 4 seems to emerge (Hopkins and Beacom, 2006; Li, 2008; Ota et al., 2008; Yüksel et al., 2008; Wang and Dai, 2009).”
GeV gamma-ray attenuation and the high-redshift UV background (2009, result): “Higher rates have been found by other authors, including those who have derived star-formation history from detections of gamma-ray bursts (Yüksel et al. 2008).”
CONNECTING THE GAMMA RAY BURST RATE AND THE COSMIC STAR FORMATION HISTORY: IMPLICATIONS FOR REIONIZATION AND GALAXY EVOLUTION (2011, methodology): “Earlier work (Yüksel et al. 2008; Kistler et al. 2008, 2009; Wyithe et al. 2010) has suggested that this ratio increases with redshift in the sense that GRBs are more frequent for a given star formation rate density at earlier times.”
THE COSMIC CORE-COLLAPSE SUPERNOVA RATE DOES NOT MATCH THE MASSIVE-STAR FORMATION RATE (2011, unknown): “Their data are well fit by a smoothed broken power law of the form (Yüksel et al. 2008) ρ̇∗(z)= ρ̇0 [ (1 + z)aη + ( 1 + z B )bη + ( 1 + z C )cη ]1/η ,(1) whereB = (1 + z1)1−a/b, C = (1 + z1)(b−a)/c(1 + z2) 1−b/c.”
Keeping the Universe ionized: photoheating and the clumping factor of the high-redshift intergalactic medium (2008, background): “Complementary estimates of the high-redshift star formation rate based on measurements of the high-redshift (z = 4 − 7) gamma ray burst rate (Yüksel et al. 2008) and measurements of the Lyman-alpha forest opacity at redshifts z ∼ 3 (Faucher-Giguère et al. 2008) indeed suggest z ∼ 6 SFRs that…”
UV CONTINUUM SLOPE AND DUST OBSCURATION FROM z ∼ 6 TO z ∼ 2: THE STAR FORMATION RATE DENSITY AT HIGH REDSHIFT (2009, background): “Since GRBs are perhaps a good tracer of massive star formation in the high redshift universe (e.g., Yüksel et al. 2008; Li 2008; Kistler et al. 2009) and may not be biased to lower metallicity environments (Prochaska et al. 2007), we would expect GRBs to occur in galaxies roughly in proportion to…”
THE STAR FORMATION RATE IN THE REIONIZATION ERA AS INDICATED BY GAMMA-RAY BURSTS (2009, methodology): “Other effects, including the selection ofz-ranges and the inclusion/exclusion of particular bursts, are discussed in Yüksel et al. (2008).”
Muonic Boson Limits: Supernova Redux (2021, unknown): “[84] which is piecewise linear in log z of the form”
The luminosity function and the rate of Swift's Gamma Ray Bursts (2009, background): “The same tests used in §4.1, can be used now to check the consistency of the data with a rate proportional to the SFR.”
Gamma-Ray Bursts in the Swift Era (2009, background): “The greatly-increased number of redshifts available for Swift bursts have motivated several such comparisons, and for the first time, estimates of cosmic star formation at high redshift z > 4 using the Swift redshift sample (Chary et al. 2007, Yüksel et al. 2008).”
The physics of gamma-ray bursts & relativistic jets (2014, background): “ity selection eect against detection of high-zGRBs, this high-zexcess eect is even more signicant. Detailed studies of this high-zexcess eect have been carried out in the last several years (e.g. Kistler et al., 2008; Campisi et al., 2010; Qin et al., 2010; Virgili et al., 2011; Robertson and Ellis,”